I am glad you posted here! I love Leda! And the rest of course I enjoy the apple scent of our purple splash, I have been working around her this week and it is so refreshing. And a perfect scent for the location. The apple orchard section of the garden (of course there is a peach and apricot there too. And persimmon and grape fruit and...)

Sorry you're going to miss the blooms. I'm still waiting for blooms. If my brug was about to bloom and I had to leave, I would almost take it with me. LOL Maybe someone can take pics for you while you are away. On any account...Enjoy your camping trip. Deb

I do not believe that there is such a thing as bad Clematis that won't bloom because they were purchased from a big box and I don't think tissue culture is a factor either. 'Miss Bateman' is 'Miss Bateman' no matter where she was purchased. She could be mis-labled for sure but I'm thinking that she must be one that is slow to establish rather than that you have a dud plant. I would also pinch the tips to see if you can get more new growth that might bloom. I personally, hard pruned a bunch of Type IIs that didn't do squat and had big results. While I did not correctly hard prune many of my Type IIs in the beginning to get them off to a good start, NONE of my Type IIs except Piilu has "leaped" in the third year. Even those that were correctly hard pruned years one and two.

Thanks Jen! Yeah, the mealey battle has been a full scale war this winter. I had one plant (a veitchii gardenia) that I found last spring that had mealies and I had isolated it and worked on it all last year and through the winter (it is finally clear). But by golly it spread like wildfire in here - hoyas, stephanotis, passifloras, oleander, coffee arabica. They completely took down my regular carnosa last summer and all I could do was cut a clean piece off, root it in water, and pot it up. The rest of the plant was tossed as the vines progessively died due to the stress. The cutting is doing well so far. The only things they didn't touch in the immediate area were my overwintering habanero pepper plants and my rose-scented geranium. That's interesting to consider. LOL I got the stems all sprayed on the compacta and I put it outside to isolate and will continue the treatments every couple days. Look forward to seeing it bloom again! Now to attack the lacunosa, which has been blooming on and off all winter but that got the mealies first. The lacunosa has such fragile leaves compared to the carnosas that I wanted to be extra careful with it. Plus it has tons and tons of bloom pedicels all over it that I don't want to knock off. Then I have to tackle the incurvula, which doesn't seem to have it that bad. In fact, I might do that one next and leave the lacunosa for last. Here are the bloom remains from the compacta!